Long Day

no trespassing 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

My mom has to have a blood transfusion today. This sounds like a terrifying Buffy-esque procedure and actually, damn if it isn't, particularly if your ideas of hell are less along the Goth lines and more along the formica/carpet/unidentifiable sterile smells/Nurse Ratchet lines. I took her in this morning at 8:30 for the transfusion, which process had not been explained to her at all by the referring doctor. She thought it would be an in and out visit and she would feel fabulous immediately. "Like Keith Richards," I said. "Who is Keith Richards?" asked my mother.

We were wrong about the in and out. A transfusion is an all day thing. First off, at 8:30 in the morning they take some of your blood and then they send it off to the blood matching center and then you either wait, or leave and come back two hours later when they have gotten your blood delivered and then, you must stay all day in your lounge chair, having blood slowly, slowly added to your system. We left two tubes of her blood there and went for coffee by the pond near her house, which is where this duck with his blase attitude towards trespassing came into the picture. Then we went to BB Barnes, the fancy garden store my mother adores, and then, since she has been worrying over returning a garden umbrella to Pottery Barn, we did that, and dropped the dog off for dog daycare at the groomers and then we went back to the blood place.

The transfusion center is in the back of the Verlo Mattress Store, which usually boasts the Verlo Mattress Man, a guy dressed in a really horrible stained and ripped old mattress, standing out front and waving at cars. I think it's possible that the Verlo Mattress Man has the worst job in Asheville, and I also wonder if the marketing geniuses who came up with his job description have ever considered reupholstering him, because as it is he's the saddest, sleaziest, $5 by the hour love motel mattress I've ever seen. The blood center is also sad and kind of sleazy. It's way in the back, and it is staffed almost completely by women with thick country accents and big hair. It doesn't seem overwhelmingly clean. It smells unsettling: antiseptic but grungy, with a faint but definite aroma of old cigarettes and lost dreams, as if someone had turned a dive bar into a blood center. There is a central desk with a lot of industrial pink lounge chairs around it: the chairs have large numbers on their backs in peeling black electrical tape. My mother is in chair number 8, and she will be there all day. She has an Agatha Christie novel and her Ensure and some water, and maybe she can watch a movie, although all the movies they have there are children's movies.

She didn't want to sign the papers that said if anything bad happened she would go to the emergency room and I had to make her sign them by promising to highjack the ambulance if necessary. My mother says she will never go back to the ER, and this usually makes people laugh a little, but the large nurse was curt and unfriendly and said, "Well then honey, you ain't gonna get your blood today." So she signed. Nothing bad will happen - the large nurse unbent a little afterwards and said that they had never, ever had a problem. I hope she really is a nurse. I don't think she is. There are fake looking certificates, probably run off a MS Word template, on the walls, saying that these people are certified in something or other and I had this terrible vision of it being a one day AB Tech class in drawing and giving blood. I wouldn't be surprised.

So I left my mother there for the afternoon, without even the slim comfort of the Verlo Mattress Man (maybe he's only out on weekends?) but I think she will sleep. And maybe, this evening when I take her home and I have a rum and coke and she has a scotch and Ensure, she will feel better, like Keith Richards, who, as I told her, has eternal youth if not beauty because of all the blood of virgins he gets from a secret Swiss clinic. Which probably isn't behind a mattress store.